I've been developing a old-school styled shooter for about ten* months now. Game's called Crisis Wing and it draws inspiration from early 90's pre-bullet-hell arcade games. Game is my solo effort.Game plays quite a lot like classic Toaplan games, except the game flow is a bit faster, like CRS68k or Viper Phase 1.

Ok. Game is nearly finished. All levels are done and most of the assets are in!Some minor tweaking for improved flow & more balanced rank/endgame is still underway, but generally the game is feature and content complete (98% at least)Also a lot of graphics has been altered and improved.

Main game mode has 6 stages per loop; it takes about 40 minutes to complete a loop.

It will take at from weeks to approx. 2 months to finalize the product.There are some technical tasks, such as proper multi-monitor support and fully rebindable keys/controller etc.Also some optimizations can be made to cut down loading times as well (but these can be patched to game as well, as loading times are not that bad to begin with).

25.12.17 Edit

A new update!As some of you might know, Crisis Wing (or basically a fork of main game called Caravan Edition) won Asm07 Game Development Compo in August. Yay!After the compo, I did some roadtripping in the west coast of US (total solar eclipse etc..) and resumed work in mid september. I also do this game besides my day job, so at times I find it rather hard to schedule out time for development of CW.

But game is progressing very well indeed...A lot of bugs has been squished and game is starting to really shape up, most of the basic code is done. What's missing is the finalized game content; the sixth stage, some audio, intro sequence and finalized menu graphics.5 out of 6 stages are finished (minor tweaks might still come underway for enemy flight and bullet patterns) and game has working controller support as well as two player mode.Caravan edition's time attack mode has been integrated to the main game.

Last edited by pieslice on Thu Apr 25, 2019 9:14 pm, edited 15 times in total.

Cool, screens look very atmospheric already, got me looking forward to more info/media.I'm wondering, did anything from Sylph Wind (never forget!) make it into this project? I'm assuming not since this seems like a game with simple shooting-based scoring but I figured I'd ask anyway.

Cool, screens look very atmospheric already, got me looking forward to more info/media.I'm wondering, did anything from Sylph Wind (never forget!) make it into this project? I'm assuming not since this seems like a game with simple shooting-based scoring but I figured I'd ask anyway.

Nope. This is built on Unity and Sylph wind was a proprietary engine built on my own tech. I decided to scrap Sylph Wind as it did not turn out as good as I would have wanted it to be.This game's scoring is built on raizing style medaling chains. You can also trigger galaga styled bonus waves by destroying certain enemies.

I think it would be even better if everything was done at arcade resolution (including rotations and other transformations) then blit that buffer at double or triple scale in native resolution.When you rotate a scaled sprite and see diamond shaped "pixels" it kind of breaks the low res illusion.It's best to do all transformations on a small buffer then draw that buffer at a clean integer scale onto the main buffer.

_________________Some of the best shmups don't actually end in a vowel.No, this game is not Space Invaders.

- Medal system is pretty straight forward- Love the music - Stage 3's BGM is tits- Shot sound (both enemy and player) is good and more importantly not annoying for something you hear repeatedly- All of the explosions, including the player explosion and bomb, are fucking manly - I like the transition between stages- Enemy design is on point, never felt like "that guy again"

- Only complaint, and it's minor because the music is so good, but there is no boss bgm (yet?).Edit^^^ - Just reread the first post.

Questions:

What exactly is the hit box? Had a hard time telling if it was the ship of cockpit (small screen)

What is the "P" icon next to your score?

Overall looks tight and is something I will be buying if development continues as it has. Good luck.

Hit box is the grey thing in the dead center of your ship. Hitbox is not as small as in bullet hell games; it's about same size as later toaplan titles such as v-v or batsugun (but smaller than truxton 2)

If you pick up the same colored power up than you currently have, you'll earn the 'P' token. Next time you pick the same colored power up, the 'P' is consumed and your weapon power level will increase. You can power up two times.If you pick different color, you'll switch weapons.P token remains between lives and even between credits.

Wow. This game's presentation is through the roof. You're doing this yourself???!!!Fantastic job with that. The music is good, the pixel art is excellent, and the enemy design is great.The power up system you have looks simple and intuitive, but varied.

Checkpoints.Why checkpoints? I understand using them for continues, but being sent back every time you die is quite unforgiving.For me, they're pretty rage-inducing (make it through a hard section, take a hit, and have to do it again. This is especially painful with bosses).I understand their use in the arcades. Checkpoints required more memorization, which means more quarters fed into the machine, but I don't think they're necessary now.

If you want to keep the checkpoints, it might be a good idea to balance them a little (Possibly with an autobomb that uses all of your bombs, or maybe getting hit would reset your powerup to default if it was powered up, if it wasn't, you would die, etc.). Just a suggestion. I'm sure there are other ways to balance the game.

Overall, the game shown looks great! The game feels.. well, I can't actually play it, but it looks like it feels great. Keep up the good work; I'm looking forward to seeing what you'll do with this.

I don't think it's necessary, as enabling checkpoints won't hurt your score; actually it is the other way as tactical suicides in checkpoints with a lot of popcorn enemies (which'll drop medals) might give you a nice score boost.

Also the fact that the game has no speedups and that most of the checkpoints start with a powerup carrier should make checkpoint recovery rather lenient.Bomb damage vs. bosses is the thing that needs at least one balance round w/no checkpoints and or/2 player mode.

Game has also rank (which is at the minimum in the video as I died a lot); the rank actually works very well and scales upwards nicely (without an upper bound) so I can implement several loops if I wish so.

Last edited by pieslice on Mon Mar 13, 2017 3:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think it's necessary, as enabling checkpoints won't hurt your score; actually it is the other way as tactical suicides in checkpoints with a lot of popcorn enemies (which'll drop medals) might give you a nice score boost.

Yeah; that's what I meant. Different score potential.

pieslice wrote:

Game has also rank (which is at the minimum in the video as I died a lot); the rank actually works very well and scales upwards nicely (without an upper bound) so I can implement several loops if I wish so.

I think it would be cool to have fixed rank per loop, increasing by a set amount per loop if you're going to do multiple loops (which I think would be cool).

Are you the only one working on this- music art and programming? Impressive! Watching the video, this looks pretty great! I think the only thing I would tweak is making the beginning of stage one a little more aggressive in terms of enemy fire, since there are not too many bullets firing (I think you mention rank being set low in your play in general).

A minor suggestion: when you get the blue power-up, you are apparently awarded some normal-looking missiles that fire ahead. Nothing wrong with the weapon itself, but I don't think it reads immediately "blue" like the powerup suggests. I would change the missile palette to have a richer wash of blue colors (complemented by an orange/yellow flame exhaust?), and maybe a slightly flashier sci-fi design to give them a bit more "oomph" and desirability.

_________________NTSC-J:You know STGs are in trouble when you have threads on how to introduce them to a wider audience and get more people playing followed by threads on how to get its hardcore fan base to play them, too.1CCs | Twitch | YouTube

After spending a good two hours with the demo I can honestly say this doesn't surprise me at all. All around this is an excellent effort. Congrats pieslice!

The game looks fantastic. The sprite work is top notch, and I love how the colors sort of glow with regards to light sources. Lasers, your ships engine, shots, and explosions all have this eye catching quality.

Control is tight and the ship speed feels perfect for its size. Hit box feels fair and I never once felt that dying wasn't my fault.

A lot of fun is crammed into this demo - I patiently await the final product.